Women’s magazines have an extensive history of promoting abortion. Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Glamour and others regularly publish articles with a pro-abortion agenda and rarely balance them with pieces from a pro-life perspective.
Abortion advocacy is creeping into teen magazines, too. Teen Vogue especially has been publishing articles sympathetic to abortion in the past few years. The latest article features a young woman who volunteers as an escort outside a Planned Parenthood abortion facility in New York state. The article highlights the roles of abortion clinic escorts whose job is to shield women from pro-lifers who stand outside.
Volunteer Kara McGinley wrote a piece describing “what volunteering at an abortion clinic is like.” She described a hostile atmosphere where pro-lifers “yelled” at her and told her she was just as “bad” as the abortion practitioners. She painted pro-lifers as unreasonable, even racist, for attempting to dissuade women from getting “appropriate and affordable healthcare.”
“This is what makes me want to continue clinic escorting,” McGinley wrote. “The protesters don’t care if women are there for other reasons, like a pap smear or a checkup, because they believe that if you use the clinic you are supporting it and therefore contributing to the problem. Without these volunteers, women wouldn’t be able to access their healthcare as easily.”
She continued:
Protesting is legal. It’s our right as Americans to do so. It’s our Freedom of Speech. But the issue is that most of the clinic protestors cross the line to harass and bully. Our goal is to get the patients in the door safely and block out the protestors and their signs as much as possible. Another tactic is to distract the protestors by interacting with them. If they’re busy arguing with us, they don’t target the patient. It all sounds pretty simple, but it is not that easy.
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The first woman harassed that day had a child with her and the protesters cornered her to the point of almost dropping her baby.
“Don’t do it! We can get you help!” they screamed as another escort smiled at her, showed her the door, and apologized for the protestor’s presence.
“Why do you love death so much, do you know what you’re doing?” one protestor asked me.
After a few hours of being the protestor’s human dartboard, I felt detached from the world. On a different street, a man was jogging and a woman was walking into a bodega, but on the street outside the clinic we were in an incessant vocal battle of scientific facts and scripture, of women’s rights and safety.
Abortion activists often use words like “scream” and “bully” to paint pro-life sidewalk counselors in a bad light. McGinley implied that pro-lifers are racist, hateful and threatening. However, most sincerely want to help babies and their moms. An abortion is not just a medical procedure, it’s a procedure that kills an innocent human being’s life and often leaves women feeling emotionally scarred for decades.
While there are some exceptions, most pro-lifers strive to be peaceful, compassionate and non-aggressive as they stand outside of abortion facilities. Most sidewalk counselors simply try to offer women another option for themselves and their babies by providing information and resources that the woman may otherwise not know about. They try to encourage women and show them the value of their unborn child.
The world-wide 40 Days for Life campaign has thousands of volunteers who stand outside abortion facilities every spring and fall to pray and offer support to moms and their babies. The faith-based campaign instructs pro-lifers to be positive, peaceful and prayerful. It discourages shouting, confrontations and the use of graphic images. The campaign believes a compassionate approach will help turn “hearts and minds from a culture of death to a culture of life.” And through their efforts, thousands of babies and their moms have been spared from the pain of abortion.
This fall, these peaceful pro-life campaigns are taking place in all 50 states and 23 nations. So far, 40 Days for Life reports 244 babies have been saved from abortions.
